After getting feedback from developers about a recently announced contest, PayPal has changed its terms and conditions and is extending the submission deadline by 2 weeks. The competition offers developers prizes for submitting the best PayPal-related application for social-networking site FaceBook.
According to the original terms, developers granted eBay an exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensable right to use and sell the Application. AuctionBytes blogged about the one-sided terms on Monday. A PayPal spokesperson had told AuctionBytes at the time that it wanted exclusive license in order to ensure that winning applications would be reliable. "If you think about it," the spokeperson said, "we have a vested interest in this too, we want to make sure that if applications are out there with our name on them or with our endorsement on there, having been a winner of the contest, we want to make sure they can deliver all the time. If the application were to crash or to have other issues, we want to make sure we can be on hand to lend whatever expertise we can to make sure that that doesn't happen."
PayPal changed the terms of the PayPal Developer Challenge on Thursday, making the license developers granted to PayPal non-exclusive. The same PayPal spokesperson told AuctionBytes that when a person submits an application to the contest, "we can use (the application), but the developer can still use it." He said, "We really value our developers and want to do the right thing for PayPal and developers."